Ideas matter — and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible. - Sam Harris

many a brute appears to have seized Fortune herself by the skirts.

Well, that’s a very interesting question,” he said — to which he had no interesting or even sane answer. He simply conceded that if the Messiah came back and reconvened the Sanhedrin, well, then, yes — though mere mortals like ourselves might not see the wisdom of it — homosexuals, adulteresses, witches, and Sabbath breakers would be killed, and every other barbaric prescription found in the Old Testament would apply. As I was contemplating where on his person I should aim my vomit, he managed this final defense of his religion: “You just don’t understand what an obscenity — what a sacrilege — these things would represent in the presence of the Messiah

People of faith tend to argue that it is not faith itself but man's baser nature that inspires such violence. But, I take it to be self-evident that ordinary people cannot be moved to burn genial old scholars alive for blaspheming the Koran, or celebrate the violent deaths of their children, unless they believe some improbable things about the nature of the universe.